The 2023 National Biography Award winner
The State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW) has announced Ann-Marie Priest's 'perceptive' and 'creative' biography of the elusive Gwen Harwood, one of Australia's finest poets, as the winner of this year's $25,000 National Biography Award.
My Tongue Is My Own: A Life of Gwen Harwood reveals a deeply passionate figure who refused to be bound by convention, and reclaims Gwen Harwood’s unique and powerful place in Australian literary history. As SLNSW noted, 'The judges were unanimous that My Tongue Is My Own is “the book Gwen Harwood deserves.” A substantial work peppered with literary scandal and mischief, they praised Priest’s “scholarship and analysis”, “perspective understanding of an elusive subject” and “creative approach".'
'Ann-Marie Priest has captured completely the sprite-like nature of one of Australia’s finest poets; a woman who used a fierce intellect and penchant for trickery to upend dusty institutions that steadfastly refused to see women as capable or talented,' said Senior Judge Suzanne Falkiner. 'Through these pages, the great poet feels so alive.'
My Tongue Is My Own: A Life of Gwen Harwood, by Ann-Marie Priest
Gwen Harwood is renowned for her brilliance, but loved for her humour, rebellion and mischief. A public figure by the end of her life, she was always deeply protective of her privacy, and even now, some twenty-six years after her death, little is known of the experiences that gave rise to her extraordinary poems. This book follows Harwood from her childhood in 1920s Brisbane to her final years in Hobart in the 1990s. It traces how a lively, sardonic and determined young woman built a career in the conservative 1950s, blasting her way into the patriarchal strongholds of Australian poetry.
Harwood refused to be bound by convention, ‘liberating’ herself, to use her word, before women’s lib existed. Yet she also struggled for much of her life to combine marriage and motherhood with her creative ambitions. In this sense, she is a twentieth-century everywoman. She is also a unique and powerful presence in Australian literary history, a poet who challenged orthodoxies and spoke in a remarkable range of voices.
This illuminating, moving biography reveals a deeply passionate figure both at odds with her time and deeply of it, and reclaims and celebrates this important Australian writer.
Also announced was the $5,000 Michael Crouch Award for a Debut Work.
This was presented to Tom Patterson for Missing, a gripping story about a brilliant misfit and former law student who lives for decades in the wilderness of northern New South Wales.
Missing by Tom Patterson
Hey mate, Pete and Steve have been talking to some people who live around the national park where Mark lives … nobody has seen him for months … We’re about to head into the gorge … I’ll let you know what we find …
In 1972 Mark May is eighteen. He is bright, beautiful and has a scholarship to study law. Ten years later he descends alone into remote gorge country in north-western New South Wales. He lives in rough camps and stays for thirty-five years. Then, on a feeling, his brothers go looking for him.
Missing is a true story of immense emotional force. It tells of a broken life and a ruptured family but is also a spare and eloquent story of survival that carries a deep humanity. It announces a significant new talent in Australia writing.